Category Archives: Halloween 2010

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

Today’s denizen of the Netherworld is none other than a Thon, one of the rock demons who guard the prison of Tholey’s Keep…

Hailing from episode 73, Egon’s Ghost, this guy is imposing, though not as quite as its master. In the episode Egon is zapped by a monster turned into a spirit. In an attempt to save him, the guys accidentally fully transport Egon to the Netherworld where he’s captured and imprisoned by Tholey, a pretty gnarly looking demon. Peter, Ray and Winston have to travel to the other side in order to rescue Egon and bring him back home.

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

The ghosts just keep getting creepier and creepier, but this guy is just icky in a weird scary baby kind of way. Makes sense, as this is the natural form of Victor, from episode 75, Victor the Happy Ghost, who spends most of his time as a Casper-like baby ghost…

It’s all in those big baby blues…

Of course the guys feel bad after busting Victor in the Natural History Museum, so on the urging of Janine they let him roam free in the firehouse. All hell breaks loose and naturally Slimer is the only one to realize what’s going on.

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

Today’s junk-pile of a villain comes from one of my favorite 1st season episodes (#10, “Take Two”.) The gang flies out to California to take on the role of consultants for the official Ghostbusters movie (which just happens to be the actual live action film that the cartoon is based on for all you meta fans out there.) While the studio is getting the stages ready for filming they let loose a ghost that’s been trapped for decades, which finds a corporal body in a huge prop robot on the lot…

This guy has a major case of the insanes in those big yellow eyes!

One bit of trivia in this episode, when the guys are looking over the casting sheet, cartoon Winston reads out the major players (Akroyd, Murry, and Ramis), neglecting to mention Ernie Hudson, the actor for whom he is the counterpart. It’s just another in a long line of examples where Hudson gets shunned in marketing and promotion for that first film. Oh, and as far as the meta reference above, according to the cartoon universe, they came befre the movie, which is sort of a weird chicken and egg paradox…

You can get an idea of what the original ghost and robot prop look like above, as well as what the two of them merged typically looks lie in the episode. The cel (top) and the screencap below have him in a much more menacing, yet foreshorten-d portrait…

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

So initially when I was first scanning in the monster cels for this year’s countdown, I was pretty darn excited when I took a closer look at today’s gang of spooks. First of all, we have what can only be described as the ghost of Abe Lincoln (who ad the time of broadcast had been a specter for 6 score and 1 year.) If a spectral Lincoln wasn’t cool enough, I noticed that there were actually two cels stapled together! Ectoplasmic Abe was actually a correction on top of the original cel which featured a similar, yet wholly different ghost!

Before tracking down and watching the episode (#62, Deadcon 1), my hope was that I’d discovered a secret ghost that never made it to broadcast air. I was a little suspicious of this desire though, as the pencil under drawing for the cel actually featured Ecto-Abe. Since the correction only featured Abe alone on the cel, it didn’t make sense that he was a correction, but instead the originally intended ghost…

My question now is where are the original drawings with the secret ghost shown below (who is on the same layer as the rest of this gang in the cel and there would need to be a drawing to procel the cel.) I suppose that the drawing I do have is a copy/tracing of the original drawing with the non-Abe ghost, as it’s possible that repainting a series of cels is more time consuming than just painting one new character to supersede the original image. Either way, the dapper man in blue below is the main ghost at Deadcon 1 int he actual story, and the first to appear in the episode, so he’s not super secret at all.

This episode is a really fun one though, involving a spoof on Donald Trump, with the unveiling of the new Plump Towers convention center in New York. Hosting both a dentist’s convention as well as another more mysterious event, things start getting creepy and silly pretty fast. See Deadcon 1 is a gathering of monsters and ghosts bent on taking over the world. The guys are called in to take care of this posthumous party, but have to find a way to do so without relying on their proton packs (so they don’t zap any dentists or cause any damage to the new building.) The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man also makes an appearance as he’s invited to be the keynote speaker of the event…

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

Today’s dragon-like monster is yet another mystery to me. Again, though I swear I’ve inched my way through every episode of the Real Ghostbusters over the least year, I missed one featuring this big purple menace. All I can say for sort-of-certain is that I believe he destroys a bridge in New York. How very Godzilla of him…

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

Today’s spooks, though not terrible scary are kind of neat in that I’m pretty darn sure they’re some sort of weird reference to the Simpsons. They’re also linked to a monster I shared on last year’s countdown, that I’ve reposted below…

Hailing from episode 121, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, we have Foul and Peg, the parents of two precocious rag-a-muffins and a dog/tick creature that are all looking for a new place to live. Apparently, while the Ghostbusters are on a camping trip, a supernatural real estate agent starts showing the firehouse and this nuclear family decides they’ll take the place. They throw out all the Ghostbusters equipment and remodel the place to look like the Munster’s or Addams’ family estates and of couse, the guys return and hilarity ensures. Well, kind of.

I was kind of bummed watching this episode because of the obvious missed opportunity. See, instead of featuring a story about a supernatural real estate agency showing potential properties for ghosts to haunt, the writers took the gag to literally and actually had the monsters move in. It would have been so much more interesting had it been more of a haunting that the guys were unaware of until the ghosts starting making themselves at home. Instead we get weird squatters that let loose all the ghosts in the containment unit because they feel that they’re the real squatters. It just comes of convoluted and werid. Sigh.

Anyway, what I find the most interesting about this episode is the similarity in character design to the Simpsons. At first I thought that this was just one hell of a coincidence and that the Ghostbusters episode was released before the Simpsons debuted, but after digging a little I noticed that this episode premiered in November of 1990. Heck by then we’d already had our first glimpse at the Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons, and by then they were practically a full blown phenomena! There’s no way that these ghosts are just coincidentally linked to the designs of the Simpsons, but why? I don’t get the homage or the gag. Just weird.

Oh, and this crazy Bart monster above is named Bob (at least I believe his is, the audio was kind of garbled in the episode…)

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

So did anyone guess what episode yesterday’s monster was from? Today we have his brother in arms Kishar!

These two guys hail from episode 122, Very Beast Friends. Immortal giant monsters who love to hate each other and have been battling for millennia, Ansar and Kishar are searching for a way to finally destroy each other once and for all. When they get the idea to inhabit the bodies of two mortal human beings, Ray and Peter get sucked into the fight. When ever the two guys get testy with each other they literally transform into 40-foot monsters from hell, scratching and clawing it out to the death and it’s up to Winston, Egon and Slimer to calm them down long enough to find a solution…

I really dug the concept behind this episode, and it was a nice way to work in some Godzilla-esque beasties. Along with Monster Egon from last year’s countdown, I now have an almost complete set of “Ghostbuster Monsters”. Did Winston ever fully wolf out in an episode? I know there’s one with Janine getting possessed, though I haven’t tracked down a cel yet…

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

So today’s beasty is actually the first of a two-part duo. I’m going to play the mysterious host and just say that this guy’s name is Ansar…

He might look familiar, but a bit hard to place. Let me give you a hint, look for a clue in his hair…

Come back tomorrow for the reveal of this guy’s backstory, as well as his other half when I reveal another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel!

For all of those joining me for the first time, welcome to the Return of the 31 Days of Monsters Halloween countdown here at Branded in the 80s! I had a blast last year, so again I’m counting down 31 of my favorite monsters from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. All of these monsters come straight from my vintage animation cel collection, and my wife and I tried our best to put them in a not-so-scary to really-freaking-creepy kind of order with the creepiest falling on All Hallows Eve.

Today’s ghoulish ghosty is none other than Karro Zans, a tricker from the other side that is looking to bring over a horde of spirits in the mortal world…

He pops up in episode 123, Ghostworld, in which he cleverly disguises himself as Carl Sans, the owner/operator of the newest theme park in upstate New York called simply enough, Ghostworld. In order to get his spectral friends from the “other side” to the mortal realm he has to find enough vessels, bodies of humans so they can be possessed and used as transportation. To do this he tricks the Ghostbusters into coming to the park, possesses them, and then uses their bodies as goodwill ambassadors to lure the unsuspecting public into the park. Dastardly!

Though he’s not terribly fiendish looking in the cel I procured, he is one heck of a scary monster (as seen in the below screenshot to the left.) Ghostworld is another example of an episode with some decent to great animation, though the episode does have its ups and downs.

There were a couple of other cool aspects to this episode. For one, we’re introduced to Egon’s mother. Also, the theme park actually has some pretty great stuff in it, like a ferry boat constructed of a giant insect that’s pretty darn cool. One of the rides even manages to predict the overall concept behind one of my favorite Disney theme park attractions as well, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. The zapper guns (above) even look strikingly similar to the ones eventually built for the Disney ride…

Come back tomorrow for another Real Ghostbusters monster animation cel as I count down towards one of my favorite on Halloween day!